


Hold On

by Nottherealdean



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Gore, Gen, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-09-30
Packaged: 2018-04-01 14:47:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4023883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nottherealdean/pseuds/Nottherealdean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean hanging out with Cain's severed hand. Diverges from canon after 10x14, The Executioner's Song.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dean stared numbly at the hand lying on the barn floor, pale against the dark wood and blood-stained straw. He wished it wasn’t there. He wished he hadn’t cut it off.

The ache in his side and head and his exhaustion hit him in a rush, and his balance faltered and he nearly fell. His footfall as he caught himself thumped loud in the otherwise silent room, and Cain’s hand shifted slightly. Dean was too wrung out to get his thoughts in order quickly enough to blame the movement on vibration in the floorboards before the hand’s fingers curled—a clear, deliberate motion.

Dean used the First Blade as a prop to keep himself from falling as he leaned over to pick the hand up off the floor. He held it  around the first knuckles, his thumb pressing into its palm. It was warm still, and it felt alive. Gently, it squeezed his thumb.

Dean was tired, he was hurting, and he thought if Cain’s hand held onto him for a second longer he’d fall apart. He’d crumple into a mess on the floor and he didn’t think he’d be able to get up again. He stuffed the hand into an interior pocket of his coat and made himself take the first step toward the stairwell.

 

***

 

He put the hand on his nightstand. It was body temperature, but he was still half afraid it was dead—truly dead. He’d tried to not think about it while he’d forced his legs to be steady as he descended the barn stairs, and had almost blocked its weight out of his mind when dealing with the three of them downstairs. He could barely remember what the ride back the the bunker had been like. He thought—maybe—the hand had been pressed tight to his side, but that could have been him dreaming up what he wanted to feel, and not caring where it came from.

The hand was still at first, then the fingers stretched out. Dean sat down on his bed and watched it. After a moment he took a deep breath and leaned forward.

“Um. Can you hear me? Knock twice for yes.”

The hand lay still, and Dean felt oddly abandoned.

“Cain?”

There was still no response. Dean reached out and nudged it, and it rolled onto to its side a little to curve toward his touch.

So there were two ways Thing was a lie, Dean thought; the hand couldn’t hear him and it didn’t end in a smooth, skin-covered stump of wrist, but an ugly, raw wound. Cain’s knife had been sharp, and Dean had cut with a single fast stroke, but a severed hand could only be so neat. The hand had left a smear of crusted flakes on his nightstand when it moved, and its stump was a ring of dried blood around a still-tacky core.

Dean got up and put the plug in the sink drain, then ran it full of water. When he picked the hand up it settled, relaxed but not limp, into his. He dipped it along with his hand into the warm water, and then started rubbing soap onto it.

 

***

 

Dean closed his bedroom door, and leaned back against it like it would shut out Sam and Cas’s game of pretend. He could keep faking it for their sake—he’d done it before and he could grit his teeth and muscle through again—but he wasn’t sure how long he’d be willing to this time.

Cain’s hand, dry and its wrist wrapped in bandage, was resting on a wadded-up t-shirt on his bed. Dean slid it to the side to make room for himself and flopped down, recovered enough to know he should be more cautious but still too worn out to care. And if the hand wanted to, and found its way to one of his guns or knives while he slept, would he really mind?

Dean pulled his legs up, one at a time, to unlace his boots and tug them off without getting up. He tossed them to the floor without looking where they landed, and went to sleep with his clothes on. He dreamed about a knife in his hand and a field full of hacked-up corpses. He was reeling in an endless daze of horror when a squeeze of his shoulder woke him out of it.

He sat up, breathing hard, and twisted to look for the person holding him. He felt a burst of loneliness when he saw no one there, but realized the grip was still firm on his shoulder. Cain’s hand was there, fingers against Dean’s collar bone and thumb resting at the base of his neck. Dean grabbed its fingers and squeezed back, and it started stroking him with its thumb.

It shouldn’t have helped. The nightmare was about the Mark, and Cain’s hand should be the symbolic embodiment of the worst the Mark could mean. The hand that was rubbing circles onto Dean’s skin to slow his heart and ease his breath was the one that Cain used to hold the knife for his genocide, the one that held the Blade to Dean’s throat because there was no hope for either of them except dying. But it was there, and it was better than nothing because without the symbol there’d still be the reality, and Dean wanted to at least have the comfort of something he could hold that would hold onto him back while he slipped under.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean lay flat on his back with his eyes closed, listening to the music like it could flood through him and wash him clean. Between the soft, cupping foam of his mattress under him and the light weight of his hand—resting atop Cain's—on the center of his chest, there was a feeling of gentle pressure holding him steady. His mattress a barrier between him and Hell, the hand a shield from Heaven, both of them cradling him from Earth. They were tissue-paper armor at best, but they were _something_ between his skin and the world, and that was the best he could manage.

His nightmares were getting more frequent, and he was starting to become more aware inside them. This time, instead of being frozen in horror amid the strewn corpses, he’d been able to reach for the wall and had woken just before collapsing against it. He could still feel the vertigo threatening to rise above the edges of the still, stable bed and pull him under.

The muffled sound of the doorknob turning and Sam’s voice jolted Dean out of his attempt at calm.

“Hey, Dean, I made hashbrowns—”

Dean pulled his hand and Cain’s away from his chest and pressed them flat to the mattress beside him. He tried to hide the motion as part of sitting up.

“What?” Dean asked, tugging his headphones off with one hand and surreptitiously slipping Cain’s hand under the sheets with the other.

“What was— Did you have something…” Sam started to ask, then faltered and tried to smile encouragingly. “I said, I made you breakfast.”

“Oh,” Dean said, “Well, let’s get at it, then.”

He made a show of dragging himself to his feet, rucking up the sheets and hiding the lump as he did so.

 

***

 

Dean was brushing his teeth—peppermint flavor covering up bland potato lying on top of the lingering taste of blood—when Sam walked in on him again. Dean saw him spot Cain’s hand sitting on the lip of the sink and recoil.

“What _is_ that?” Sam asked, then immediately continued, “I knew you were hiding something, but what the hell—”

“It’s nothing,” Dean said defensively. When Sam drew in a breath to start arguing, he grudgingly admitted, “It’s nothing _bad_ , okay? It’s Cain’s. In the fight, I cut it off and afterwards I… I took it with me.”

“Okay, you realize that’s completely—” Sam stopped, staring at the sink with a horrified look on his face.

Dean followed his gaze and saw that the hand was finger-walking toward the tap. He grabbed the hand, getting it held back behind him before Sam had finished drawing his gun.

“No! No, Sam, you don’t need to do that,” Dean said. “Put it down, everything’s fine.”

“ _You_ put it down. That’s the hand of a mass murderer, Dean! We gotta destroy it. Why would you even want to keep that?”

“He wasn’t a bad guy, Sam. Okay? And it's… it’s helping.”

“Helping with _what?_ ”

When Dean didn’t answer, Sam pressed further. “What am I not getting here, Dean? You’ve got the reanimated hand of the _father of murder_ , and you’re what? Keeping it as a pet? I mean, do you really need this right now?”

The hand had shifted in Dean’s grip so it was clasping his hand back. Its warm skin touching his and the severed stump out of sight, he could almost believe someone was there behind him. He could almost believe Cain was there, reassuring him.

“Yeah, Sam. I do,” Dean said. “What you’re not getting is that I’m not coming out of this. I’m going to die, and that’s the _best_ case scenario.”

“I’ll find a cure, Dean, just give me time to—”

“There is no cure. And you saw how trying to live with it worked out for Cain. So let me do what I need to do to hang on as long as I can.”

Sam looked devastated, and Dean couldn’t bring himself to care in more than a distant, exhausted way. Cain had been his last hope, a distant promise that maybe—if he tried hard enough and was lucky enough—Dean could control the Mark. That hope had bleed out along with him, and now Dean wanted to let it rest.

“Please, man, just… go with it,” he said, and he could see Sam shift from wavering to yielding. He lowered the gun.

 

***

 

Dean was heating up chili when Sam cleared his throat behind him. He was hovering in the kitchen doorway looking nervously hopeful.

“What, you want some?” Dean asked. He’d kept himself awake the night before, and he had no intention of making it any easier for Sam than Sam was making it for him.

“No, I um, I wanted to talk to you about something,” Sam said.

Dean put cheerfulness into his voice. “Okay. So talk.”

“Could you… put that away first?”

“My food?” Dean said, digging his heels in harder.

“No. _That_.” Sam pointed at Dean’s shoulder.

“Sure, Sam,” Dean said with a tight smile. He picked Cain’s hand up from its resting placed on his shoulder and stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans. He turned to stir his chili, and let his smile relax into something more genuine at the soft choked noise Sam stifled behind him. He poked at the chili a moment longer to settle his expression before facing Sam again. Sam looked like he’d been slapped.

“What do you want to talk about?” Dean said.

“I… I figured out what went into the witch’s hex bag. We’ll send you back to being a kid, no more Mark, no more problem.”

Dean’s expression started to slip. He had thought the spell that taken his body and changed it into his teenaged self was a way out, an escape he could grab onto if only—. But he knew now that it might take the Mark off his skin, but it wouldn’t make it _gone_. It would be a second chance for it to bind him even tighter. It would etch itself deeper, closer, into his bones, and burn there like it had always been a part of him, a parody of starting over masking something he didn’t want to have to deal with yet.

“Come on, Dean. This fixes it! You’re not going to say anything?” Sam asked, frustration, even anger, sharp in his voice.

Dean didn’t want to tell any of the thoughts that had suddenly sickened him to Sam, and didn’t know how he’d get Sam to understand when he was flinching away himself in any case. It was almost with relief that he turned to an easier reason to dread Sam’s plan, and asked, “What goes into the hex bag?”

Sam hesitated, then tried to bullshit. “Some basic stuff. A few obscure things we can put Cas on. Nothing we can’t get.”

“Uh huh,” Dean said, voice flat and his own anger rising. “Things like virgin’s hearts, maybe? Or uh, tears from a murdered kid? How about a soul, Sam? Anything like that?”

“No,” Sam said too quickly, “Nothing like that.”

“Right,” Dean said no longer trying to hide either his bitterness or disbelief.

Sam looked momentarily guilty, then determination swept it away. “This will fix everything, Dean! Don’t you want that?”

“Not at that price, Sam.”

 

***

 

The water was teetering on the thin, perfect line between painfully hot and disappointingly warm. With eyes closed and the white noise of the water, it was as close to peaceful as Dean had been in days. He ran his fingers through his hair and over his face even though the shampoo and soap had long since been rinsed away. He cupped his hands to catch water to splash on his face anyway, but when he opened his eyes to watch the water pooling, fear drove out the fragile calm he’d built up.

His hands were full of blood. It spattered down from the shower head, the heat of it now sickening. It covered his whole body and ran down his skin to puddle at his feet before seeping away down the drain. He could never be clean.

Dean twisted the shower knob off with a shaking hand, then closed his eyes again and reached out until he touched cool tile. He leaned his forehead against the wall and breathed deeply while the last of the blood drained from the pipes in heavy drops onto his back.

He told himself that if it were real blood, it would smell. He knew the smell of blood. The bathroom smelled clean, like hot water with hints of shampoo, and that was what it was. When he opened his eyes again the blood would be gone.

Dean looked, and it was still brilliantly red, like a slaughterhouse had opened up shop. It smelled like it too, now. The odor rose up around him, even though he knew it was impossible. Instinct overwhelmed him and he shoved himself away from the wall and the two bloody handprints and the viscerally-disgusting smudge from his face. He stumbled backward until he hit the far wall and slid into a dizzy heap on the floor.

When he staggered to his feet again, he was cold and stiff and his hair was almost dry. The walls, the floor, his skin—it was all free of blood.

He slowly walked across the bathroom and pulled his robe down from its hook. He shrugged it on stiffly and without thinking put his hand into the pocket. Panic shot through him when all he felt was the terrycloth seam. He dug in deeper, searching for Cain’s hand despite knowing that if it were still there, he’d have felt it. This wasn’t the Mark strengthening its stranglehold. If the hand was gone, it was really gone, and one of the last rocks Dean had to stand on had crumbled. He jammed his hand into the other robe pocket, then whirled around when he came up empty, eyes flicking around the bathroom.

It was under the shower, trying to feel in a circle around itself. With relief, Dean collected it up and put it back in his pocket. It must have, he realized with an aching gratitude, climbed down from his robe and come to find him when he’d left it for so long and the room had grown cold. He wouldn’t have felt it patting at him while he lay shocked and numb on the floor.

Dean kept his own hand in his pocket, reluctant to lose contact with Cain’s hand again. It must have had a similar anxiety, or maybe it felt his and sought to relieve it, because it clasped him tightly.

His pulse no longer pounding in his ears and his panicked fear subsiding into sluggish dread, Dean wrapped the robe tighter around himself and stepped out into a hallway that felt bizarrely unchanged. The disorientation of coming out of his hallucination was almost as sharp as slipping into it, the clean walls and floor suddenly untrustworthy, like a mask slipped back into place after the monster behind it had been revealed.

The Mark didn’t have to wait for him to be vulnerable. It could rise up and take him at any time. Dean gripped Cain’s hand harder, and went to bed.


	3. Chapter 3

There were voices murmuring. Too soft for him to make out, but loud enough in the dark silence of 4am for him to recognize them. Dean pulled himself out of bed and put Cain's hand—clasped with his—into the front pocket of his worn-too-long jeans, then carefully opened his bedroom door and slipped out. 

The hand hung on firmly but without the tension it had had earlier, after he had thought he had lost it in the cold expanse of the bunker’s showers, and as he walked down the hallway Dean mulled over a now-familiar question. How much could the hand sense? His heart rate he was pretty sure of, when it was touching him as it was now. But could it feel the Mark pulling on him? Had it walked itself through pooled water, or the slightly thicker feel of blood when it came to find him in the shower? And as ever, along with that came the nagging worry of how much the hand could _think_. Selfishly, Dean wanted it to be aware, to know who he was and to be acting deliberately when he woke to find it squeezing his arm or when it patted at his neck while riding perched on his shoulder. He clung to those gestures of comfort, that stirred him out of nightmares and sudden surges of fear and despair, whether they were pure instinct or conscious acts. But it would be nice if they were intended to help him. It would be nice if it cared. 

The voices became clear enough that Dean could tell were talking about making the hex bag. He heard Cas's voice suddenly stop, and assumed he was making shushing motions at Sam from Sam's cut-off query.

"You should have paid more attention to the blueprints, Sam," Dean called out ahead of himself. "The vents here share a duct with the ones in all the rooms on my hallway." 

There was the heavy, metallic sound of the dungeon door closing. He turned the corner and they were standing, looking both guilty and defiant, in front of the closed door. 

"It's probably a safety feature,” Dean continued. “You know, so someone would hear if something nasty got out in the middle of the night. Think that’s something I should worry about?" Whatever they had hidden in the dungeon behind them, it wouldn’t be pretty, that he knew for sure. Whether it was something dangerous in its own right, he had no idea. 

Cas broke the awkward, simmering-in-resentment silence first. "Dean, we’re going to save you.”

"Nice dodge. What's in there?"

"You'd know if you gave a damn about fixing this," Sam shot back, and Dean almost laughed. 

The image of childhood wouldn't fix it. _Real_ childhood had been when it started. Removing the Mark and calling it good would be like scraping open rust bubbles and then slapping on new paint: the root of the problem was deeper, and repairing the surface wouldn't touch it. It would make it look nicer, and from the inside it would continue to eat him away piece by piece. 

“What—” Cas started forward, the sudden confusion on his face quickly changing to something else that made Dean brace himself. Cas grabbed Dean’s arm and yanked his hand out of his pocket. 

“Dean,” Cas said, disgust clear in his voice as he held up Cain’s hand gripped tightly in Dean’s, “what are you doing with this?”

Dean pulled back, then jerked harder to make Cas let go. 

“Cas—”

Cas finally dropped Dean’s arm and the rising swell inside Dean started to subside before it could break like a tidal wave. It had almost swept over him, carrying him along while he watched his own actions through a haze. The adrenalin rush from it, combined with the thought of the Mark taking over again, left a tremor in his hand as he pressed it—and Cain’s hand—against his thigh. Cain’s hand tapped its thumb on the back of Dean’s hand, then gave him a gentle squeeze.

“Get whatever the hell is in there out of here,” Dean said, flatly. He didn’t know whether either of them knew how close to disaster they had come, but he did, and all he wanted to do was leave. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s going to make everything worse, so stop. Okay? Just… stop.” Dean turned to walk away. 

“Dean…” Sam said, and Dean wanted to yell at him to shut up, that he’d kept silent moments before, and now he wanted to open his mouth? Dean bit it back, afraid of losing control to anything, even his own natural-born anger. 

“We have to do _something_ ,” Sam pleaded. “You’re getting worse and I have to stop it.” Frustration and fear were in his voice in equal measure, and Dean made himself pause long enough to answer. 

“Yeah, well. You’re going about it all wrong.” 

Dean heard Cas say something to Sam as he walked away, but didn’t bother paying attention to the words over the sound of his own leaden footsteps and the throbbing ache that had blossomed inside his head.

 

***

 

He ran his fingertip along the raised surface of the Mark, tracing back and forth along the longer, bent line. The brand was just a symbol of the Mark, which went deeper than anything on skin could ever show. Burning, slicing, even cutting the whole arm off: none of that would remove it. More disturbing still, the Mark itself was starting to feel like tip of another iceberg, lurking dark and unseen except for the distortion of the water around it. 

Sam was right, Dean couldn’t keep putting one foot in front of the other and calling it good enough. Something had to be done. It was a conclusion he had dreaded, had shied from, and now that he had reached it at last, a duller fear draped itself across him. 

He shifted Cain’s hand from its resting place on his chest to higher, along the curve where shoulder met neck. It pressed itself firmly against him, then pulled itself further still, to lie against his cheek. 

Dean knew what would work, if anything would. It, too, had been looming at the edges of his mind, consolidating into a plan that rose, entire and workable, as soon as he stopped pushing it away. 

 

***

 

The unfamiliar car, picked from the least-noticeable corner of the bunker’s garage, rumbled along the quiet street. He would have rather had the Impala, a known source of comfort and the veneer of stability, but the sooner Sam realized he was gone—not sleeping, or in the firing range, or holed up somewhere else in the cavernous bunker—the sooner he would start searching. It wouldn’t take long for him to expose Dean’s text to Cas, sent on Sam’s stolen phone, asking him to leave the First Blade at a drop box. With enough time the two of them might figure out where he was headed with the Blade, and while Dean was almost there now, Cas could quickly block his path. 

The neighborhood he drove through was peaceful, and it added a surreal layer to Dean’s passage through the rows of houses and yards. Death and violence were twined around him, wreaths of blood and destruction that should have split open the cheerful serenity and burned it to ash. The disembodied hand—the hand he had hacked from its body, instead of letting it cast down decimation like it was mercy, instead of letting it put the First Blade through his own flesh—was nestled in his breast pocket like a love letter. Washed clean, and painted with sigils, it was the same light weight it had been the first time he carried it with him. Into the other side of his coat he had tucked the First Blade, similarly decked with every ward he knew of that might keep it hidden. Murderer’s hand and murder weapon, held close on either side of his chest, and for one he didn’t have the excuse of pragmatic, ruthless need. Cain’s hand he had brought with him out of affection, for the comfort it could offer against both his destination and the Mark. More than that, for something to cling to while what loomed behind the Mark rose, shadowy but immense, from the murk.

The hidden iceberg, the monster from the depths—the thing that would crush the ship he’d been bailing out for so long now and send it down into the darkness, was showing itself at last. All the Mark did was give a borrowed name and power to something that had curled itself around his skin long before Cain laid a finger on him. It was the rifling engraved on the bullet at long last, the nicks left in the knife blade, the ticking countdown finally displayed on the bomb—the implacable signs showing them for what they were. That was what the Mark was at its heart: a stamp showing him as the weapon he had always been. A body that could hold a gun, a knife, an archangel. A mind that could get the job done. The weapon they needed, all of them. Michael, John, Cas, Sam. The whole world. 

And Dean too, to keep himself alive. Without the shotgun at his shoulder and his finger on the trigger, how long would he have stayed afloat? And without the bone and muscle made for the angel waiting in the wings, he never would have existed at all. 

The playground swung into view, and Dean’s personal horror was met with the neighborhood’s own. Bright equipment, a slide, swings—the sand box. A woman reading on a bench, and a girl playing, and beneath their skins something else entirely.

He pulled up to the curb, and was barely out of the car before both angels were on their feet, staring at him. He walked across the grass, stopping well back of them. Their arms were hanging loose at their sides, hands empty and ready to grasp blades sliding down into them. 

“I need to use your trap door,” Dean said, “so open it up.”

“Why would we let you into Heaven?” the angel inside the girl asked. Her contempt was obvious. 

“Because this—“ he rolled up his sleeve far enough to show the Mark, “—is going to be an even bigger problem for you later if you don’t.” 

“And what will letting you in do, other than take that problem off our doorstep and into our house?” the other angel said.

“Unless you’ve done the smart thing and killed Metatron, he’s the best shot at dealing with this, and I don’t think Hannah’s going to want to let him out of the slammer again. Ask her, see what she says.” It was a gamble, deliberately calling Hannah’s attention to him, but he wasn’t going to get through the portal without her permission. And if she did check with Cas, there was a chance that Dean might still talk his way up anyway. Her priorities and Cas’s diverged significantly, when it came to some things. 

The angel frowned, and shared a glance with the girl. Light swirled, cracking open the world, then subsided after she stepped through into nothingness. The girl glared at Dean while they waited, but Dean was too tired to respond with his own silent hostility, and instead tried to feel the breeze lightly skimming his face. It wasn’t as strong as the subtle pressure of Cain’s hand, an indistinct lump through the layers of fabric between them. 

The angel returned. 

“She said to let him through,” she reported, her voice neutral as the portal gaped wide behind her. 

Dean, bitterly grateful for the angels’ tendency to follow orders over their own judgement, walked between the two guards and into Heaven. Hannah was waiting for him, flanked by two other, stone-faced angels. They were in a white hallway, closed doors lining the walls. Dean thought it looked like a corporate hellhole. 

“I need to see Metatron,” he said. It was impossible to be sure whether she would agree or not, but with only two angels at her back, he didn’t think it likely that she would try to kill or imprison him. 

“After what you did to him?”

“Yeah.” A surge of anger fought through his despair. 

“I won’t allow angels to be tortured, or killed. Even him,” Hannah countered, voice hard. 

“The way I hear it, you kill any angels who won’t run home when called.” 

Doubt flashed across her face, but she let that point drop in favor of another. “He won’t give you anything unless he gets something that would help him in return, and that’s too dangerous to allow.”

“He’s a bored egomaniac who likes to hear himself talk. He’ll say something.” And no doubt at least half of it would be lies, Dean knew, and the rest either taunts or insults. 

Hannah looked unconvinced, but she turned to her angels. 

“The cell door stays locked,” she told them. “No matter what happens.  If he tries anything,” she looked back at Dean, making it clear who she meant, “use as much force as you need to.” 

She watched, a wary presence behind him, as the angels escorted him down the corridor. A door, sturdier looking than the ones they walked past, led them to a different section, the lights overhead harsher and the blank executive atmosphere stripped back to something more overt. They came to a row of cells, in old fashioned stone and iron bars. 

Metatron had heard their footsteps, and was standing in the exact middle of his cage, his back to them, dramatically. He turned when Dean cleared his throat, but his haughty expression faltered when he saw who it was. He tried to recover, plastering anger and contempt—genuine enough in their own right—over his fear. 

“I said I would rather die than ever help you again,” Metatron said. “And I hope it hurts,” he added, with increasing venom, “I hope you keep the few marbles you have left long enough to know what’s happening as your soul rots from the inside like a mangled piece of roadkill!” In his fury he stalked toward the bars of his cell, and Dean took several paces forward to meet him. The angels didn’t stop him. “You’re going to destroy everything you’ve ever stood for, everything you’ve loved!” Metatron yelled. “I’ll watch you do it and _laugh_.” Without dropping his gaze from Metatron’s, without letting the angels behind him see the motion of his arm, Dean slipped his hand into his shirt. “You’ll get no mercy from me—” Dean’s fingers touched ancient leather, gripped it, and he took one last breath. He grabbed the back of Metatron’s neck, choking him off in the midst of his ranting by slamming his head forward into the bars. At the same time, he drew the First Blade, jamming it between the cold iron just far enough to slice skin and flicking it sideways. A wisp of blue-white light bled through, and in his last moments, Dean let go of both Metatron and the Blade. Before the clatter of bone hitting the floor, before Metatron could raise his hands to his throat, before the angels standing at his back could lung forward and grab him, Dean opened his mouth and against all instinct, forced himself to inhale. 

Metatron’s grace burned in his mouth, then leapt to a new level of agony as it burrowed deeper, down his throat and to his stomach, sliding into the tissue itself as it passed and detonating there. It felt like every atom of his body was being forced apart, an incredible, overwhelming pressure squeezing them aside while simultaneously wrenching them one from another. The light was blinding, to his eyes but somehow also to his mind, a blazing whiteness so intense it was excruciating in and of itself. There was no time or space for anything but the pain, not even for a wordless understanding that it was working, that the explosion of grace inside a vessel it shouldn’t be in was the same kind of force it took to sunder a body so completely its soul couldn’t exist inside it. There wasn’t going to be any _inside_ left. Every tiny piece of him stretched to its breaking point as the pain reached—impossibly—a greater climax. Pink misted the whiteness, bled darker, stronger, and the agony began to throb. Each pulse was harder than the last, keeping pace with the intensifying redness. The relative relief between the waves of pain gradually allowed weak, hazy thought to creep back into Dean’s mind, and as the peaks themselves started to subside as well, he recognized the throbbing as a heartbeat. It was his heart, still pumping away, and the rest of his body alive and whole with it. His vision drifted back, the hot, lava-glow brightness seeping away as the last of the pain gentled into the new sensitivity of freshly healed skin and muscle. 

He was still standing, Metatron still stumbling back and clutching his neck, now leaking nothing but a thin rivulet of blood. It hadn’t worked, after all. Dean was alive, the Mark coiled possessively around his body and his soul, leashing one to the other with a bond that couldn’t be broken without someone else to wield the First Blade and cut it. 

Before the full weight of that knowledge could fall on Dean, and hand clamped onto his arm and spun him around. Another slammed into his other shoulder. Instinctively, Dean brought his hands up to try to shove them away, and the angels were flung off of him in a burst of reddish light. They tumbled into the far wall, and flopped limp to the floor. 

His breath came fast and ragged, while the world slowly settled back as the Mark released its grip, and the slight distortion of his senses—more a shift in focus rather than a blurring or sharpening—faded. He didn’t know what to do, with his last-ditch plan in ruins around him and the Mark stronger than ever. And he had eaten an angel’s grace—an angel he despised—and it was still in him, and, transmuted into something else by the Mark or not, the thought made him want to gag.

Dean was startled out of his numb confusion by a scuffling noise. Metatron was scrambling to his feet. Eyes wide and wild with horror, he pressed himself against the back wall of his cell when Dean looked at him. Whatever unrelenting, blood-soaked future Dean had ahead of him, for now he wanted to get out of Heaven. He pressed his hand to his chest, feeling Cain’s hand still hidden safely in his pocket, and walked away from the terrified, de-graced angel and the two unconscious, or more likely dead, bodies. 

He came to a hastily-mustered handful of angels readying themselves around a corner of hallway. Dreading the thought of the Mark overtaking him for the second time after asserting its permanence so spectacularly, Dean kept the Blade down at his side while raising his empty hand placatingly. Quick, hurried steps sounded further along the hall before he could tell them to let him pass, and Hannah cut through the cluster of angels to stand at their head. 

“What did you do?” she demanded. “Did you kill—”

“I didn’t kill Metatron,” Dean cut her off. He left the two slumped guards out of it. “Maybe made it easier for you to do it, though, if he counts as human now.” Confusion, followed by disgust, swept across her face. The angels behind her took firmer grips on their weapons, and Dean realized, with slow surprise, that his worry over the Mark was the only fear he felt. He didn’t think they were strong enough to hurt him, anymore. 

Testing it, he reached out, not with his body but with the power he had felt the Mark use back at the prison, that had spilled rays of magenta light when he pushed the guards away from him. Cain’s hand shivered in his pocket. The angel with the obnoxious haircut gave a startled cry and dropped his blade, clutching at his wrist. Before the others could react to the new threat, Dean shoved them to either side of the hallway, and they went. 

The Mark itself stayed quiet, passive on his arm and in his mind, as he walked between the angels pinned to the walls, toward the portal behind them. It didn’t blaze up in a surge of violence, and in its absence temptation, or triumph, or genuine hope snaked into Dean’s mind. He couldn’t die and he couldn’t hold back the Mark when it defended him with thorough annihilation, but he might be able to turn such defense unnecessary. If he could make himself beyond the threat of shattered bones and torn skin, the fear of death and injury, then the Mark might stay quiescent instead of coopting him, body and mind, as it saw fit. 

As he stepped into the glow of the portal, Dean reached for Cain’s hand. He held it, fingers interlaced with his, while he passed back to the world. 


End file.
